Making Project Management Cool: TimekeeperExt

Abstract

I don’t like to mince words, so here goes: I hate project management! To me, it’s a rather dull endeavor. It’s a lot of time spent bugging people on the phone, asking them what they’ve accomplished since the last time I bugged them. It’s a lot of time writing status reports for stakeholders and explaining why this is late or why that is taking longer than anticipated. Given that, project management is an absolutely necessary evil, and I respect those who do the job—it isn’t easy and requires great skill to do well. Still, project management, for me at least, isn’t the most exciting job imaginable, but I see no reason not to make the chore as fun and sexy as possible! So, the goal of this chapter is to create a basic project management and timetracking application using ExtJS (so we know it’ll be fairly sexy automatically). As we develop this application, you’ll see another approach to structuring an Ext JS application, and you’ll meet a few more UI widgets in real usage. You’ll see a few Ext JS utility functions in play, gain more experience with the data subsystem, and play with the database component of Gears a little more. In the end you’ll wind up with a useful tool, albeit not quite on par with Microsoft Project, for tracking the status of a project.